Saturday, 26 November 2011

I bought 4 different types of Christmas fabric in 1/2metre lengths from the Hulu online fabric shop, and a length of white binding from EBay, and then followed the instructions on this excellent tutorial:

Tuesday, 15 November 2011

So we tried our first training session today. Started off with a run down from the house and up Chapel Lane and then Dark lane. The main road was more hard work with Rosie pulling lots, but loving when we ran - especially the sprint to the lights. Once we were on the back roads she calmed down a bit and was pulling less. I just had to be careful with her nose following running style as she has a tendency to dart in front of me... Once we'd got to the end of Dark Lane we started walking to do some training - she was getting tired from the running at this point and had calmed down quite a lot.

All I did with the training was stop. When she pulled on the lead. Just stop. Not say anything. Then when she slacked the lead/turned or looked towards me, I'd start walking again and praise her. As soon as the lead went taunt again, I stopped. By the time we got to the crossroads, she was starting to understand what she was supposed to do and was definitely pulling less.

Tuesday, 8 November 2011

So this is the first attempt at making Christmas Cakes and these are to go into the Christmas hampers. I've used the recipe from the Good Housekeeping Baking Book, and put it into 6 baby tins (4.5'' ). There was a fair bit of cake mixture left over so I put the remainder in my smallest loaf tin.

I wasn't sure how long these would bake for as the recipe says 4 hours for a 9'' round tin. So I did them for 2 hours, making sure that I turned them and rotated them between the two shelves every half hour or so. I was paranoid about burning the sides so they had double layers of baking parchment on the sides and bottom, and a double layer of brown paper around the outside of the tins. All look good, tho a bit fragile as they're not very deep. The larger one in the loaf tin I cooked for about 2 1/2 hours.